Daniel Er­lands­son Arch En­emy

Er­lands­son Strips Down For Will To Power

“It’s not just the ac­tual record­ing. It’s more be­ing in­volved with every step of the process from the very first demos and ideas. The drums are laid down be­fore any­thing else and that was done in Stu­dio Mega out­side my home­town, Var­berg in Swe­den. That’s also where we recorded the drums for our last al­bum War Eter­nal. It’s an old barn ba­si­cally re­built into a stu­dio and they started record­ing be­fore it was en­tirely fin­ished, but they were so chuffed with the sound that they chose not to com­plete the in­te­rior. You can still see holes in the roof, but what­ever works.”

What kit set-up did you use for the ses­sions?

“I used the kit that I have here in Swe­den which is a Pearl Car­bon Ply Master­works kit. It’s ba­si­cally 6-ply maple with a layer of Car­bon Ply on the in and out­side of the shell. This time I stripped down the size of the kit a lit­tle bit. I ended up us­ing just one kick drum, two rack toms and one floor. When you have a big­ger kit, you tend to use all of it all the time. I felt like the songs needed a lit­tle more of a stripped-down ap­proach in the play­ing, that’s why I started to re­hearse the demos us­ing a smaller kit. I ended up get­ting so used to it that I brought it into the stu­dio. It worked per­fectly.”

Do you mainly work off the gui­tars and let Sharlee D’An­gelo’s bass fol­low your drums?

“I would say that the mu­sic we play is so heav­ily gui­tar-ori­ented that I work mainly with the gui­tars, try­ing to find cool ac­cents within the riffs. That’s what I fol­low the most, then Sharlee comes in and some­times he plays along to what­ever I have recorded, which works out fine. Then af­ter a few years of play­ing the songs live, they start to take on a new shape. For ex­am­ple, we have some older songs that we’ve been play­ing live over the years and there’s parts where me and Sharlee in­ter­act quite a bit that we didn’t do on the al­bum.”

Do you try to think melod­i­cally as well as rhyth­mi­cally?

“Ab­so­lutely. It’s hard to ex­plain. For ex­am­ple, you hear a riff and you add the drums and you have a cer­tain idea of what you want to em­pha­sise in that riff and that’s def­i­nitely a melodic thing. And you think about the song as well. You don’t want to play too much in a cer­tain part. You want to get the best out of the song.”

Were there any tracks where you tried some­thing new or that chal­lenged you?

“Hmm. That’s a good ques­tion. Not to make it sound bor­ing or any­thing, but I wanted to hold back a lit­tle bit and let the songs breathe – not all of it be­cause there are some pretty pro­gres­sive, tech­ni­cal mo­ments as well. It’s def­i­nitely a chal­lenge to just hold back and play the most ba­sic stuff you can imag­ine.”

Daniel played a smaller kit and went for a stripped-back ap­proach on Wil­lToPower